Showcase Reflection

The 16th of June is a date I'm not going to forget for a very long time. For on this day my year, graduating class of 2016, held our End of Year Show at the iconic and landmark theatre, the Komedia in Bath. It definitely wasn't easy to organise, and I'd be lying if I didn't say our tutors helped us a great deal with organising it. 

One of the issues we had was getting all the videos onto a DVD to project in the theatre. This was difficult because all the videos were exported with different settings and audio levels. So if they were played as-is, some would sound very loud and some will sound quiet, there would be no balance. So to correct this we had to get everyone to re-export there videos with the correct audio settings. So when they were put onto a DVD, they all played evenly.

We also had to put together a guest list and invite people from the industry. Unfortunately, due to time and unforeseen occurrences, a fair few of our invitees couldn't make it. But I was fortunate to have a lot of my friends and family come to support! (As pictured above). I was especially glad that Emily Price could make it! She is the singer and songwriter that performed the song I used in my music video!

Although we had both seen it countless times, this time was the best for us. We both thought it was actually very emotional. It was almost like the end of a journey. And an end months of hard work and planning. But also the beginning of much much more. Emily is so incredibly talented and I can't wait to make more music videos for her! And grow the skills I have already learnt from this course and my tutors.

I was also thankful to be awarded 'Most Dedicated Student', and it's a testament to the hard work it took to complete, and to do well on this course. I'm glad it's over because I'm excited to start a new chapter in my life, but I'm also devastated. This course has been the biggest aspect of my life for the last two years and it's going to be really hard to get used to not having it anymore. I made some incredibly close bonds with some incredibly talented people on my course and I look forward to working with them in future.

But I'd like to thank my tutors most of all, so so much for their patience, kind words and hard work they put into teach us, I greatly appreciate it and hope they're able to continue inspiring future classes for years to come.

How Have I Done Cinematically?

When I embarked on this momentous undertaking, I had three music videos that I used as my primary sources of inspiration. That being:

Marry the Night by Lady GaGa for its slow paced storyline and cinematic wide pans and use of fire.

Then there was Alright by Kendrick Lamar for its incorporation of black and white video, politically charged lyrics and death-defying stunts all in one masterpiece of a music video. 

And lastly, Let It Go by James Bay for its somber pans and focus pulls, toppled with the understated fact that everything around him was burning to the ground, making for a timeless work of art.

I tried very hard to emulate each of the best aspects of these music videos and I'm quite happy with the results. My pacing wasn't quite as quick as Lady GaGa's but thats because I wasn't able to make it as long as I wanted it to be, so I had to speed things up a lot. 

And although I didn't go for a black and white video like Kendrick Lamar's, it was still monochrome which gave it a similar feel. So I was happy with it as it did it's job and adding dark moods to the music video.

I was able to incorporate some somber, slow tracking shots (like the burning picture frame) just like in James Bay's music video which I really really liked and thought it added a lot of cinematic quality to it and some overall great visuals.

Members of the Public

One issue I had with filming in the public, were the members of the public. Occasionally I had to deal with nosey and inquisitive members of the public strolling along into shot, and asking what's going on. Although I'm usually very happy to help with situations like this, on some of the shoots we had very limited time to film and really counted afford to entertain any bi-standers. For example in the screenshot above, you can see two pedestrians that walk up behind the Rob and Sophia and end up remaining in shot for quite a while. So I had to stop recording and patiently wait for them to leave. 

There's not much I could of done to prevent this other than blocking off the street, but that would of been a bit drastic for the level of production I was working with.

In future, I'll just try to be more patient and make sure we're not pressed for time to film everything.

Problems On Set

One problem I faced when filming the 'burning picture' scenes is that it was so windy that night! Every time I propped the picture frame up, it would just fall right back down. I reckoned that if I the flip out stand that was attached to the back of the frame could flip out more, it would give it enough support to withstand the wind. But I bought that frame for just .99p and in trying to pull out the stand, I ripped the whole thing off! 

So now I have a frame with no stand at all on a very winy night. So Josh Watts, my pyrotechitian, searched around the garden for a brick and finallly found one. The only thing is that it was still attached to our wall. But that didn't stop Josh! No, he broke two bricks off the actual wall to prop up the frame.

In all fairness though, it worked really well! I was able to wedge the frame onto the bricks so it was very very stable, it wasn't going anywhere! Because of this we were able to film the scene without the worry of wind blowing away our props.

That scene is at 2:17 in the music video embedded down below. 

Budget for the End of Year Show

£500 Budget

- £300 for use of the Komedia
- £10 for programs
- £75 on refreshments (sparkling apple juice, finger foods, etc)
- £15 on cutlery, cups, etc
- £100 on printed DVD copies with full packaging

Peer Sssessment - Tom Arthur

"This video is really great, when you first told me about your plans for it I thought it was wildly ambitious but you’ve executed it so well. I also can’t believe how good the quality is considering a lot of it was shot in the dark - there is no noise! There’s some shots which are absolutely stunning. I’d suggest in future considering the pacing of shots as it seems like some of them are sped up or slowed down to fit the edit but really that’s just being picky. Also I wonder if the letter boxing is a bit extreme but at the same time I understand that this is an artistic choice. I love the fire effects and the embers at the end!" - Tom Arthur

Cinematic Inspiration

I was greatly inspired by Adele's 'Hello' music video (directed by Xavier Dolan) as regards it's colour grading. It uses a grade sort of like a sepia, but with an earthy green tint. That was the effect I wanted to emulate too, but just a bit warmer. I chose to make it warmer as this music video heavily centres around the theme of fire thus I thought it would be appropriate for it to be warmer. I think it worked well and made the music video feel moodier and emotional, which was my main aspiration for this music video. It also helped on a technical level as a lot of the night time scenes were tinted in an awful deep orange glow from the street lights above. This made the video look ugly and amateur. So colour correcting and grading it this way really helped save the footage. 

Before:

After: